180 @J B N o two ways about :--- ! / it-"The Voice at the Back Door," by Elizabeth Spencer (Mc- Graw-Hill), is a practi- cally perfect novel. Miss Spencer has a thrilling story to tell and she tells it quickly and modestly, never raising her voice and never slurring a syllable. Her subject is as old as the hills: what happens when a man of good wIll consents to accept the responsibility of power. The gulf between entertaining ideas about right and wrong and being obliged to act on those ideas is notoriously great, and if the man who attempts to bridge the gulf is exceptional only in hIs goodness and energy the results are apt to be dis- astrous Miss Spencer makes us see this, and then somethIng more. For though the just man who is her hero meets a fearful doom, he IS not defeated; he has had a few moments, at least, in which to taste the Victory of deliberately choos- ing right over wrong "in front of people daring you to do what you believe in and they don't." ...t\nd later there are other victories, which Miss Spencer makes us see are no less his for being unknown to him. "The VOIce at the Back Door" is not a tragic novel-is not even a sad one, despite all the blood spilled and the hearts bruised or broken- because the author takes w hat is, in these dark days, a prodigiously optimistic view of the human predica- ment. If a good man dies, it is in the conviction that there are things in life worth dy- ing for; if a treacherous man lives, it is in sIckening awareness of his treachery. Moreover, when the man who throughout the novel serves as a sort of truculent anti-hero, uncertain wheth- er to plump for good or evil, is faced at last with the mys- tery of the hero's death and of his own undeserved sur- vival, he plumps for good. The setting of "The V oice at the Back Door" is a small town in Mississippi, and the prospective reader is begged not to be put off by that perhaps gruesome- sounding fact. We all tend to draw back a little from bad down there a long time ago and that threatens to go on flickering through the swamps and bayous till kingdom come. "The Voice at the Back Door" is free of that unpleasant phosphorescence and is therefore Southern without quo- tation marks. Indeed, if the pOInt of view of any writer is reflected in this novel, It is that of a distinguished and neglected Northerner, James Gould Cozzens. ::\1iss Spencer subjects the problem on which the plot of her novel hinges-how Negroes are to be assured of equal rights in a town dedicated to inequality at any cost-to precIsely the sort of compas- sionate scrutiny of deeds and motives that made Mr. Cozzens' "The Just and the tJ n just" a memorable work of art. MIss Spencer and Mr Cozzens are d f " h " H h " d stu ents 0 w y, not ow, An they refuse to let either melodrama or rhetoric do the hard work of thought. No matter how playful they may some- times appear to be, they are always morally in dead earnest. We read "The V oice at the Back Door" as we read "The Just and the Unjust," partly hecause we cannot help ourselves-we have to find out what happens next- and partly because the authors are so profoundly concerned with the mystery of accountability, which is as good a word as any for what novels are about. We do not expect to have the mystery ex- plaIned. We only know that the most congenial place in which to circle round it is d book, and that the greater the book the closer we seem to come to the heart of the mystery. Lest it do Miss Spencer a disservice to break off a dis- cussion of her novel on this perhaps too high-and- mighty note of approbation, let it be added at once that "The Voice at the Back Door" has charm and hu- mor as well as earnestness, strawherry tarts as well as roast beef. Let it also be added that Miss Spencer is especially successful in de- scribing adult love. To be married and in love is a state that few novelists have ever managed to give a convinc- ing description of, for rea- ons that come readily to mind; somehow or other, BOOKS All Praise the now familiarly oppreSSIve cotton- growing heat, from the flyblown store windows and the red-necked hangers- on in the courthouse square. We begin to speculate on whether every native of that rather thinly populated state has set up a portable in the old dogtrot and is huntin' and peckin' instead of farmin' and fishin'. Still, we must be careful to feel no unreasoning preJudice against MissIssippi as Parnassus; in another dec- ade it may be Oklahoma's turn, or L T tah's. As for Miss Spencer, she is a Mississippian and can scarcely be blamed for writing about what she knows best. No doubt it has been awkward for her to have to make use of so many of the same materials as the master builder of Y oknapatawpha County; to her credit, she has learned how to use them in a totally different way The only traces of Faulkner Baroque to be found in her writing are in her two earher novels, "Fire in the Morning" and "This Crooked Way." Both of these novels are what we think of as "Southern," mean- ing that, in common with a hundred novels unhke them in every other re- spect, they give off the characteristic ghostly phosphorescence of something (slavery r the plantation system r the War Between the States r) that went AlRL'ME 1ft" INSURANCE FO SALES TALk PkES$ a I!' c L1 t1 . --------. 1)4ML